"This year we are maturing some nuts on the cordiformis and sieboldiana types of the Japanese walnut (young trees 3 to 5 feet high) that had no staminate blossoms. These we are producing by crossing with the pollen from one of our best Persians. We are looking for something interesting from there nuts when planted and the trees come into bearing. But all this takes time and patience. We had more chestnuts last fall than ever before, and the prices averaged higher, about 20 cents per pound, wholesale. Our best chestnuts are looking good now. Will soon be opening; usually begin about the 5th to the 10th of September, to open up. "We have not succeeded very well in propagating Mollissima (Chinese chestnut) but we find the quality of the nuts very good. All of our American sweet and all of the European type, including Paragon, Numbo, Dager, Ridgely, etc., have been gone for years, and left our Japs just about as healthy looking as they were 20 years ago, yet they were all set in the same block." THE SECRETARY: It is encouraging to know that Mr. Killen has a strain of chestnuts that will grow there without being destroyed by blight. MR. REED: Blight is not serious with his trees. THE SECRETARY: It is with mine. But Mollissima has resistance. MR. REED: The real pest in Mr. Killen's chestnut planting is the weevil. The nuts have to be marketed promptly in order to avoid destruction by this insect. THE SECRETARY: I have a letter from Mr. Littlepage, who regrets that he will not be able to be with us. Another letter is from Mr. Riehl, who regrets that because of his age he will not be able to take the long trip from Godfrey, Ill., to New York City. He writes to us of the place of the chestnut in northern nut culture, as follows: "Blight and weevil are the greatest enemies of this nut. Blight in all probability will destroy practically all native chestnut where it is native, and in all such districts the planting of chestnut orchards for profit will be useless until varieties are found or produced that are immune to that disease. In time this, no doubt, will be done. If I were fifty years younger and lived in a blight section, it would appeal to me to do something in that line. Where the chestnut does not grow naturally it can be grown without fear of the disease. I have the largest chestnut orchard in the West, of all ages from seedlings to sixty years, with no blight. Even were there no blight it would not be advisable to plant chestnut orchards where it is native because of the weevil. The weevil appears to be worse on the large improved varieties than on the smaller native. Of course any one planting a chestnut orchard now would plant the newer, larger varieties, as they will always outsell the smaller. No one who has not talked with handlers of chestnuts can have any idea of the handicap the weevil is to sales and prices. Where the chestnut is not native the nuts produced will be free of weevils.